I really like my fluffy wolf/angry pony, so at least that was worth it. And my large brown orc and my short firey dwarf warrior (one of the mains!) is fantastic.
And I’m “glad” I got to experience the view from both sides.
But mostly it just made me crabby because it’s not like one faction was having all the fun the other was missing out on. It was just two disparate forms of annoyance.
Sylvanas was 2000% never loyal to the Horde. Ever. Not one single moment ever.
But that doesn’t mean Forsaken players are wrong for being mad about losing their racial leader.
That doesn’t mean Blizzard wasn’t wrong for trashing yet another Horde racial leader.
You can have nefarious characters not betray a faction. That is a possible outcome. Blizzard just chose not to go that route cause they love cheap shotting the horde and bleeding its cast while killing one Alliance Racial Leader character a decade.
I played through the Alliance side on my night elf druid. It wasn’t enjoyable, but the bright side was that I was able to get through it without hating my own character afterwards. It’s sad that that’s how low the bar was set.
We undid every single victory the Horde had after the War of Thorns ended.
You didn’t enjoy that?
Yes and no. I always thought she would not attack the Alliance first because she didn’t want to put a giant target on her back, because she was trying not to die again. And they never did sell me on the reason why she chose to do that. Remember that we didn’t have the explanation of “the Jailer” until after SL dropped, and even then, I find that whole storyline pretty weak. But without it, her reasoning was so thin as to be nonexistent.
But a bigger issue with Sylvanas is that you can tell there was a tug-of-war happening among the writers behind the scenes over the course of several expansions. It’s pretty clear that some writers wanted her to be or become completely irredeemable while others had a more optimistic outlook for her. For a while, that worked in her favor because it kept players guessing, with some placing more emphasis on one side of her characterization and others looking more at the opposite side. But eventually, the tension just ripped her to shreds, to the point where I don’t even think of her as a character anymore. She became just a plot device attached to a set of pixels, moving the story where the writers wanted it to go.
Sylvanas was not a genocidal over-the-top-villian intent on genociding all of Azeroth.
In fact, the retcon of her raises problems. She explicitly is willing the set up a truce with the Gilneans. Except by the retcon, she wants to kill as many people on Azeroth as possible.
Ah, the joyous experience of playing janitor.
To me that tug-of-war only seems to be apparent after SL when Afrasiabi was canned. Up until then Sylvanas was pretty consistent. I believe Afrasiabi when he said that he had been writing her for 14 years up to that point, and knew her character better than the people who liked her for their own reasons. After all WoW’s lore is pretty sparse, so people tend to end up liking characters for perceived qualities that were either not intended or well established.
I think it is plausible for her to attack first if she believes the Alliance drained enough after Legion to do so. She was apparently right since the canon reason why Draenei did not help at all during WoT was that they were drained after Legion.
I think a lot of people are mad she attacked at all, and those are the people who I think have a misread on her.
When you remove the “she” it actually becomes completely impossible to tell which character you’re talking about.
Oh, I noticed it way before that. The Sylvanas who appears in Christie Golden’s novels, for an easy example, is pretty different from any version of Sylvanas seen in the game.
I personally don’t believe that Afrasiabi was the only one writing Sylvanas for 14 years. I believe he wrote her for 14 years, but not that he was the only one writing her. I don’t believe he wrote her in the Legion intro sequence, for example.
Obviously, this is all speculation, and unless someone at Blizzard spills the tea, we can’t know for sure. Just be aware that Sylvanas doesn’t look as consistent to (some) other players as she does to you.
I don’t, because avoiding death had been presented as her number one priority ever since Cataclysm.
Well yeah, Sylvanas is hardly the only one who suffers from this problem.
I don’t believe the only way for Sylvanas to have acted in that specific circumstance was to just fortify. Even if in the past she opted to do so.
I think one could see her as having adequately assessed that the Alliance didn’t have the military capability to stop her and that the Night elves are actually just idiots.
iirc Anduin said Jaina was seriously injured after that raid, and she did teleport out.
Of course you’d side with the Mag’har as they’re Orcs and Horde. There were quite a few plot holes in that scenario (eg; Yrel herself wasn’t Lightforged, accepting AU Grom, the absence of Arrakoa). Wonder if you’d feel the same if the races were swapped.
Yeah, nah, beating your enemy in a wargame is not in any way what you’re suggesting.
I don’t want to get into a big argument about it. I’ll simply say that if they intended us to see things the way you do, they didn’t do a convincing job of setting it up for me.
If Sylvanas had one consistent trait across the multitude of media she’d appeared in prior to BfA, it was that her cruelty was pragmatic. If we’re dismissing the Jailer nonsense, then no, I don’t buy that the Sylvanas we’d known until then would sacrifice a paramount military objective on a cruel whim because… what? A dying night elf undermined her despair speech? For that she would torch her gains, commit genocide, and provoke the wrath of the planet upon not only the Horde, but her, personally? The same zombie who tried to dissuade the last evil warchief from blowing up Alliance capitals on Kalimdor, knowing she’d soak the critical fallout?
I hated the WoT, and especially Saurfang’s part in it, but I can concede that a definitive plot to end the perceived threat of the Alliance was something Sylvanas might have cooked up. But I don’t consider its final act any more in-character for Sylvanas than its cloak-and-dagger phase was for the honor-brained gigaorc.
Outside of the fragile pretense of the Jailer needing a lot more souls and the only way to do that was to burn the tree, I think she would’ve.
Let’s take the Jailer and put it aside for now and cast ourselves back to before we knew about that plot point. It could be that Teldrassil held no territorial advantage to keep. Sure she lured the other Horde leaders into the war under the condition that they would capture it and ransom it, but it could be that her plan was never to capture it to begin with. I mean, the plan to capture a city and then ransom it. For what? To prove they could do it? Holding Teldrassil “peacefully” doesn’t make sense when she’s already committed herself to a preemptive strike.
Sylvanas has never shied away from salted earth tactics, she did so in Gilneas when it was expressly forbidden for her to do so. Instead of withdrawing and holding, she thought to blight the city and that is, supposedly, the reason why Worgen didn’t have a home for near on 14 years. Or part of it at least.
Surely that would’ve earned a lot of ire as well? I mean, we know it did. Because Genn pledged himself to avenge Liam and his city. That was something Sylvanas didn’t seem to mind at the time. Blighting Gilneas, burning Teldrassil, these are both the same: Denying the enemy their territory.
SL was definitely out of character for her but that’s because Danuser and Golden were the primary writers, not Afrasiabi. I remain unconvinced that BFA was at all out of character for Sylvanas.
I didn’t hate it, Actually I do agree about the Troll thing though, Talanji should’ve got vengeance! But, we abandoned the faction war for Azshara.
Now Azshara’s Patch and N’zoths were amazing, but… They could’ve definitely had been their own expansions, individually. Nowadays Female Villains are everywhere, and when given the opportunity to make one of the Strongest Female Villains be a Expansion Antagonist… They turn her into… The Penultimate Boss?
An N’zoth!? YOU ADD STUFF TO TWO ZONES, Give us a gorgeous raid, and that’s IT!? I know, Cataclysm was technically Old Gods. But, when will they TAKE A FULL SEAT! I know War Within has Xala’Tath, but that’s just a Void Elf! I 100% Bet my frontal lobe that her final boss form will just be her with tentacles! Maybe a few more eyes.
Those’re my only gripes. Other than that, BFA was great!
Afrasiabi was full of it. The burning of Teldrasil wasn’t opposed by fans, but by pretty much the whole creative team. And was done for marketting splash. And even then, his “knowledge” her conflicted with things like the example of seeking a truce of Gilneas (as I pointed out above).
What he really meant was that he had been the boss a long time, and screw everyone else. He was allowed to do whatever he want and heck with anyone who pointed out his huge change to her.
i agree sylvanas was always evil
she was also prone to gettin mad, she wasnt a goth chick she was a karen.
remember in WC3 she almost killed arthas but tried to kill him slowly instead of just killing him
then he got away.
“burn it” is in character
No it isn’t, you just hate her like all smelly dude bros do. Opinion rejected.
To get us back on topic, even if we say the burning of Teldrassil was in character for Sylvanas for the sake of the argument, it still was a bad narrative choice. It damaged her character to have it actually happen, rather than being just something she was hypothetically capable of. And it damaged both factions.
More reasons why I hated BfA (blowing my own horn a little, since these are my threads):